week 9

In which of these does a person have the LEAST amount of brain activity and responsiveness?

brain death

In which condition does the brain show a low, steady rate of activity and no response to any stimulus?

coma

What is one important function of sleep?

conserving energy

Which of the following often produces spatial neglect for half of the body?

damage in the right hemisphere of the brain

Research examining the content of dreams in American and Japanese college students found that

dream content was similar in both cultures.

The sequence of words as they are actually spoken or written is called the ____

surface structure.

Damage to the right hemisphere of the brain often leads to which of the following?

tendency to be unconscious of the left side of the body and the world

The brain is an electronic device.

true

To experience smell, our brain detects molecules.

true

Wernicke's area is critical for speech comprehension.

true

When most people read, they do so by seeing a "window" of about __________ letters.

11

How many morphemes are in the word "triangle"?

3

How many fixations per second does a typical reader have when reading an average page of text?

4

Re-synchronizing the circadian rhythm is easier after flying west, the same direction as the sun seems to rise.

True

SNC stands for suprachiasmatic nucleus

True

Sleep progress through a series of stages

True

Sleep spindles tend to occur during stage 2 sleep.

True

unpleasant dreams are called nightmares

True

Which of these sentences has the same deep structure as "John is easy to please"?

It is easy to please John.

How would the activation-synthesis theory explain why people dream of an inability to move?

It really is difficult to move the muscles during REM sleep.

What does it mean if you wake up and find yourself temporarily unable to move?

Part of your brain is awake and another part is asleep.

After a prolonged period of sleep deprivation, what happens to the brain?

Some neurons are active but others are as inactive as in sleep.

In the context of the brain, a "nucleus" refers to a group of neuron cell bodies

True

When researchers measured brain activity during a binocular rivalry task, what did they find?

A consciously perceived image activated large portions of the brain.

Suppose people hear an ambiguous sound that is half-way between dent and tent. What determines what they hear?

A person may hear dent or tent, influenced by preceding context and the next two or three words.

To what extent is infants' babbling influenced by what they hear?

At first, what they hear makes no difference; later they copy sounds they hear.

Why do cats sleep more than sheep?

Cats are in less danger while they sleep.

In the early 1900s, several psychologists reared chimpanzees as if they were children and tried to teach them to talk. What was one major reason for their failure?

Chimpanzees have trouble making human sounds.

Which of the following best describes the relationship between light-dark cycles (from the rising and setting sun) and circadian rhythms?

Circadian rhythms are generated by the body, but reset by light-dark cycles.

One explanation as to why animals sleep is to save energy

True

What evidence do we have that children exposed to no language at all would invent their own?

Deaf children who fail to learn spoken language generally invent a sign language.

Which of these is evidence AGAINST the idea that human language evolved as an accidental byproduct of brain size?

Dolphins and whales do not have language.

A lucid dream refers to a dream someone forgets.

False

Most dreams do not include visual content.

False

What evidence indicated that a woman in a vegetative state may be conscious?

Her brain activity responded to commands such as "imagine playing tennis."

What evidence suggested that some people in a vegetative state are conscious?

Instructions to imagine something activated the same brain areas as in intact people.

How does dreaming differ from other thinking?

It has less sensory input and less voluntary control.

Which of the following is NOT characteristic of REM sleep?

Most of the body's muscles are tense and active.

A worker at International Amalgamated, Inc., is currently working from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The company wants to shift her to a different work time. For the sake of her physical and mental health, which of the following would be best?

Move her to the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, then to midnight to 8 a.m. shift.

Students watched an experimenter fill two jars with sugar. They were then given two labels and instructed to label either jar with "sucrose, table sugar" and the other with "not sodium cyanide, not poison." Then the students could use either jar to make Kool Aid. What did the results indicate?

People don't fully process or trust negative statements.

During which stage of sleep is the brain most active?

REM

The terms "light sleep" and "deep sleep" are not very useful because

REM sleep is deep in some ways and light in others.

What happens to the brain's representation of a sensory stimulus on occasions when people are conscious of it, that does not happen when they are unconscious of it?

The activity spreads through much more of the brain.

Someone with right-hemisphere damage ordinarily neglects the left side of objects. What happens if the person closes his/her eyes and tries to describe a scene form memory?

The description neglects the left side.

What enables humans to learn language so much more easily than other species?

The human brain has areas specialized for language processing.

Why is it impossible for sleepwalking to occur during REM sleep?

The postural muscles are so relaxed that they would not support a person.

What problem do people with sleep apnea experience?

They often stop breathing while they are asleep.

Researchers wanted to present a stimulus that would become conscious on some trials and not on others, while keeping the stimulus itself the same. Which of these methods did they use to make the stimulus unconscious?

They presented interfering stimuli before and after the stimulus.

A less synchronized brain is a "more" active brain.

True

What evidence suggests that we sometimes consciously perceive a stimulus afterward, instead of simultaneously with it?

We don't perceive a brief masked stimulus, but a slightly longer one seems to last the whole duration.

What condition is marked by fluent speech despite few nouns, and impaired language comprehension?

Wernicke's aphasia

Brain-damaged patient A speaks fluently but is hard to understand, and she has trouble understanding other people's speech. Patient B understands most speech, but he speaks slowly and inarticulately, and he leaves out nearly all prepositions, conjunctions, and word endings. Patient A has _____ and patient B has _____.

Wernicke's aphasia... Broca's aphasia

If you were on a submarine with constant artificial light and no sunlight, what would happen to your sleep-wake cycle?

You would alternate between sleep and wakefulness on a 24-hour cycle.

Our tendency to feel wakeful and sleepy on a 24-hour basis depends mainly on

a cycle generated by a mechanism in the brain.

Narcolepsy may be caused by

a deficiency of the brain chemical orexin.

Someone who stays in a cave with no light alternates between sleepiness and wakefulness on about a 24 hour cycle. Why?

a rhythm generated within the person's own brain

In binocular rivalry, you see one image in the left eye and an incompatible image in the right eye. What do you perceive?

an alternation between one image and the other

During REM sleep,

dreaming is likely to occur.

After staying awake late many nights, Gloria has become accustomed to going to sleep late and awakening late. Now she tries to shift to going to bed earlier and waking up earlier. This shift is similar to the difficulties people face when they travel

east.

The ears are most like a radio antenna.

false

The eyes take in information even while moving.

false

During reading, the eyes alternate between fixations and saccades. Reading--in the sense of understanding the words--occurs during

fixations only.

The rate of progression through the stages of language ability depends mostly on

maturation.

Each unit of meaning in a word is called a

morpheme.

For most people, REM sleep occurs

mostly toward the end of the night's sleep.

Which of the following is characteristic of a "minimally conscious state"?

only limited responsiveness, such as increased heart rate in response to pain wrong

What is meant by the "productivity" of human language?

the ability to create new sentences

When a normal, healthy person falls asleep, REM sleep is least likely when

the person has been asleep less than an hour.

The system for converting a deep structure into a surface structure in language is called

transformational grammar.

A "saccade" is movement of the eyeballs while reading.

true

A person is considered conscious if they are aware of themselves and their surroundings.

true

An average reader makes 4 fixations per second while reading.

true

Broca's area is critical for speech production.

true

Detecting electric fields on the head is a way to detect and measure brain activity.

true

When 2- to 3-year-old children speak, they

use many verbs but few nouns. wrong seldom say a sentence they have not already heard someone else say. wrong speak better than they understand speech. wrong

Common chimpanzees that learned to communicate by sign language or visual symbols

use their symbols almost exclusively to make requests.

In an experiment a cough or a tone replaced the first "s" in the word "legislatures" in a sentence the subjects were listening to. The results of this experiment support the idea that

we hear words as a whole, rather than a group of separate sounds (letters).